ABSTRACT
Reading is now such a basic skill, seeming to transcend considerations of gender, that it is hard to think of it as having a history at all, let alone a past that belongs to the history of the relationship between men and women. But the act of reading has itself varied enormously over time, a fact that is immediately apparent from the physical form that the written word has taken. If we think of the elaborately illustrated manuscripts copied out by medieval scribes, for instance, we are obviously in a different world from that presupposed by the mass production of printed books. An early fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde pictures the author reading his narrative poem to King Richard II and Queen Anne surrounded by lords and ladies of the court, an image that underscores the oral, performative character of reading in an age of limited literacy. Indeed, in this period even reading to oneself seems typically to have meant reading out loud. Thus, among the rules of the early medieval Benedictine Order is a direction that ‘[a]fter the sixth hour, having left the table let [the monks] rest on their beds in perfect silence; or if anyone wishes to read by himself, let him read so as not
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might be an aid to meditation, but the fact that the words on the page are spoken could also undermine an atmosphere of concentration.
